Antimicrobial Label from Lemongrass Oil Incorporated with Chitosan/Ascorbic Acid

: Lemongrass oil is one of the essential oil which potential to be used as an antimicrobial agent in active packaging. The aim of this research is to prepare antimicrobial labels and assess their activity. Antimicrobial labels are made from a matrix of chitosan/ascorbic acid and lemongrass oil as active ingredients with various concentrations ranging from 1% to 10%. Lemongrass oil was characterized using Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) to determine compounds suspected of having antimicrobial activity. The GCMS chromatograms have shown that lemongrass oil contains 73.21% citral compounds composed of 29% neral (beta-citral) and 44.21% geranial (alpha-citral) as antimicrobial agents. Lemongrass oil was tested on Gram-positive bacteria Staphylococcus aureus and Gram-negative bacteria Escherichia coli using direct method and vapor method. This test has shown that lemongrass oil has antimicrobial activity in both bacteria. The labels provide optimum antimicrobial activity for the lemongrass oil concentration of 10%. These results conclude that the lemongrass oil incorporated with chitosan/ascorbic acid has the potential to be an active packaging. The abstract should summarize the contents of the paper and should contain at least 70 and at most 200 words. It should be set in 9-point font size, justified and should have a hanging indent of 2-centimenter. There should be a space before of 12-point and after of 30-point.